He follows the line of her perfect extended finger. "Y-yes," he says, so tentatively it hurts. "I believe those are droopy, wrinkled, yellow vegetable genitalia."
"Fool. Listen to me. Those are called Narcissus. Even you can see why."
"Am I responsible for etymology as well?"
She kisses him, tongue, for the whole incorporated city to see. "Yes. You are. Now. How about these?"
"Those? Piece of cake. Those are, don't tell me— Nope. I'm afraid it's strike two."
She supplies a name, which he does not even hear, so taken up is he with the soft, effusive enthusiasm in her face. Bluebells, cockle shells: could be anything. He will ask her to repeat it, explain the name here in the privacy of the world. She takes his hand with the grip of a school crossing guard. From one plant to another: who would have thought the block contained so many? Revelation creeps over him. These bee-lures, bright landing pads, reproductive export docks for photofactories temporary beyond telling, self-promoting color that next month will annihilate: each is called something, distinct, keen, revealing. Every item has an exotic label that, while not the thing, is the only way of latching onto it in the course of a walk through the neighborhood.
A good deal of his undergraduate days were spent committing to memory vast tracts of binomial nomenclature. But the genus and species identifiers inhabiting his past, while occasionally colorful, were functionaclass="underline" ratios arranging in systematic manner what would otherwise be arbitrary varietal chaos. He knows of the raging taxonomic debate between splitters and lumpers, between those who see in each individual — never corresponding to the norm, always a little bit Other—the call for a new species, and those who want to restrict the chart to broad, manageable branches. His own discipline, the tabulation of mutations at the molecular level, might solve the matter, showing gaps between species to be both discrete and continuous. But whatever the local bias, inflected, logic-bound Latin taxonomy strives to squash ambiguity, to distinguish between surfaces.
Not so Gladiola, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Mother of Thousands, Evanescence, False Solomon's Seal, Wake-Robin. The words Jeanette whispers to him, makes him repeat, ranging speculatively across the year, are not labels at all. They are intent on a different program altogether. Bidens frondosa, he learns, might go by Beggar-ticks, Ray-less Marigold, Sticktight, Devil's Bootjack, Pitchfork Weed. It might even be named the Nameless Wonder, for that matter, and still not strain the grain. According to this woman, a thousand different bi-zarrely descriptive modifiers specify the catch-all violet. The naming urge embodies the feminine miracle pouring it in his ears.
All desire comes down to naming. Yet no nomenclature will ever erase the fact: standing for is also obscuring. The real use of names must be something more serious than handle-efficiency. It must also be myth-making, resourceful approximation, soothing the scar between figure and ground, between the dead chemicals ATCG and the repeating uniqueness they have become. Dr. Koss, his Jeannie, moves him on, graduates him to bulbs that have not appeared yet, to stamens that never show themselves in this region. The game grows more incredible as it goes on. She says how the garden-variety pansy, one of the few lay identifiers he has taken for granted all these years, takes its name from pensée, French for thought. From thought to word to name to plant: the chain equating them, more fragile than the petals themselves, defies examination except through tools as fragile, of the same make. She feeds a tutoring hand inside his jacket, releasing a dam burst of labels. What, he wonders, could he call this blossomer?
"You are brilliant," he says.
Jeanette drops her jaw. "Why? Because I like gardening?"
But the germ has taken hold in him. Flowers and their cipher-texts, smearing the one-for-one trip-wire correspondence that in vitro would isolate. Can the handle relating base patterns to proteins clear this up? Or could it be that in vitro is less precise than this hopeless, associative morass: Baby's Breath, Crowfoot, Lily of the Valley, Queen Anne's Lace?
"But can we call them anything we like?" His words elicit only a confused look. "I mean," he measures, "people call flowers what their grandmothers teach them to call them. But some grandmother assigned the tag once, way back, right?"
Jeannie chuckles at his earnestness. "Several grandmothers in several places at several different times." No conspiracy.
"Why is a given common name the plant's name? No one in a million years is ever likely to argue with 'Black-Eyed Susan.' What makes it right?" Dark and disturbing, a flare threatening the reductionist certainty that has guided his every step since the home nature museum. The task of the skeptic is to determine, for every appearance, if the label fits the thing. Every tag must be either apt or inapt. Was Charles the Bald? Louis the Fat? Richard the Lion-Hearted? By a slow tightening of terms, exclusion of middles, improvement of instrument, each sobriquet's appropriateness becomes discernible. But the assumption is shaken to the core by the introduction of Jeanette the Misnicknamed. If the name is apt, it's not; if it's not, it is.
She tightens against him. Her waist persuades, hands help, eyes ratify, arms work their armistice. "Well, I suppose a name is right if it sticks, if it becomes the name."
"I'd like something more than the tyranny of the vote."
She gives him the once-over. "All right, bub. You are above average in looks, so we're gonna give you one more shot. What exactly do you have in mind?"
"These," he says, leading her by the digits. "These tiny, bulbous ones."
"Oh!" She smiles widely. "Excellent choice; the name for these is inspired. Note how puffy, spacious. And how they hang upside down. You have thirty seconds."
When he makes no reply, she patters. "Ready for this? Dutchman's Breeches." He makes a puzzled, slight tightening of the mouth, flick of fingers. Faltering, she says, "See the trousers?" There are no trousers. For one, the flowers are less than an inch across. The blossoms flare out in a three-dimensional solid, more H than Y, an oriental kite. Upside down, opening underneath. But why Dutchman? At his failure to respond, Jeannie's features deepen, ready to run from the first hint of disaster. She is more beautiful in distress than at her sunniest. He needs this woman, her scattered stimuli of joy, intensity, and fright. He will end up on her doorstep in the dark rain, waiting for her to come out and utter even so little as one not unkind word.
He drops to his knees and examines, up close, this fragile palate opening diffidently to the air. The more Ressler looks, the more iridescent the bloom becomes until it goes purple around the lip. It smells of nothing — sinister, promising, forsworn, far away, as far away as Jeannie's hair. He moves it under his eye, careful to manipulate only the stem. Glass, it would shatter at a fingerprint. Even so, nature uses him: light rearrangement of examining is enough to dust pollen across his hand.
"But what if it weren't?" he says at last. "What if it were something else? Say, the Common Speak-a-portal."
Dr. Koss, who has followed him to knee level, struggles to her feet like a newborn wildebeest. She stares at him, slowly going radiant, finding in him what she has been after. He has broken the code. Ressler too tries to struggle to his feet, but her mouth blocks his way. "Mouth" is certainly misnamed: what he kisses is something lighter, wider, more enveloping. He is set for weeks, for as long as memory holds out.
How obvious, waiting to be discovered: the tracts of rectilinear Midwest that he once loved for their reserved refusal to interfere with fact in fact consist of an indivisible density of named things. Purple-green weeds sprouting ubiquitously throughout spring. Exploding pollen packets. Seeds parachuting on currents of wind. Waxy pitchers, dull matte, convoluted packed rosettes, bright, round, fierce day's eyes, each replicating and subduing the earth, attempting to demonstrate by success the aptness of their sobriquet.